‘He had to leave the pub early because someone kicked him, but I stayed,’ my wife says
On Saturday morning, shortly after 11, I enter the youngest one’s bedroom. I place my foot on the back of his sleeping form, and press.
“Wake up!” I shout. “It’s haircut day!”
Continue reading...My wife is trying to make me shop. She’s picking young people’s clothes
It is Saturday lunch time, and my wife is lecturing everyone for making too much noise on Friday night.
“All these people shrieking and laughing,” she says to the oldest one. “And the doorbell ringing every five minutes.”
Continue reading...Episode 32 of the podcast features a conversation with Natasia Demetriou who I met a couple of years ago at The Invisible Dot, a comedy venue in King’s Cross (that I’ve just heard is closing apparently). I was MCing the evening and Tash came on stage in a pizza (or possibly nacho) costume. She proceeded to slip in and out of a weird Mexican (?) accent, occasionally singing and doing an amusingly half hearted sexy dance. That may not sound good but it was the funniest thing I’d seen for a while.
She was in a pilot for BBC3 show called People Time with her sometime comedy partner Ellie White, her brother Jamie, Liam Williams, Alistair Roberts, Daran Johnson and Claudia O’Doherty -- some of the funniest people around at the moment for my money. This year they’ve been getting together (minus Claudia) to do a monthly web series called ’2016 Friends’ on Vimeo. It reminds me of some of Tim & Eric’s stuff in parts and is frequently terrific. You’ll find July’s episode (directed by Tash and Tom Kingsley) below.
My conversation with Tash was recorded on 28th June 2016 in London. I had recorded my podcast with Sally Wainwright earlier in the day and this was a nice contrast; an altogether sillier exchange that distracted from the post Brexit gloom.
Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing.
Thanks as well to Dan Hawkins who kindly offered his services as an on line bass player and ended up providing a bass part for a new jingle on this week’s episode. Dan’s website is HERE.
I hug you for too long.
Adam B
Episode 7: July from 2016: Year Friends on Vimeo.
MICHAEL KIWANUKA -- BLACK MAN IN A WHITE WORLD
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The answers to today’s puzzles
Earlier today I set you two problems popularised by US writer Martin Gardner:
1. At the hardware store, you are told that 1 will cost you 50p, 12 will cost £1 and the price of 144 is £1.50. What are you buying?
Continue reading...Double trouble from Martin Gardner
UPDATE: Solutions now posted here.
Hello guzzlers,
Martin Gardner, who wrote dozens of books of recreational mathematics, would have been 102 last Friday. In the years since he died, his friends and fans have started a global movement called Celebration of Mind, which encourages people to put on puzzle-themed events on or around the date of his birthday.
Continue reading...After clicking publish last Monday at 3am I decided to check my work email one last time and found a notification that I was to report for flight transport the next morning. Nine of us (including my roommate Amy) lucked into fuel cache duty, which meant flying out to Round Mountain to dig fuel drums out of the snow. After a short weather delay, we caught a van out to Williams Field and boarded the smallest plane I've ever flown on, a Twin Otter.
Over the course of two weeks, our pilots had flown this very aircraft from Alberta, through Central and South America, to the Antarctic Peninsula and South Pole, finally arriving at McMurdo for the Summer season. Our flight was much shorter, only about 35 minutes each way, but it was easily the most beautiful flight I've ever been on. Some of my favorite moments in the last few years have been when I felt the smallest (see here, here, here, here, and here). Flying through the mountains, seeing nothing but more mountains in the distance and knowing that we were less than 100 miles into a continent the size of the lower 48 whose largest settlement we had just left, makes one feel rather small rather quickly.
Before we landed we did a few "low and overs" to check out the landing conditions and Amy and I were sitting in the back of the plane eyeing the vomit bags, but we landed shortly thereafter and spent about 30 minutes at the fuel cache site before a 35 minute return flight.
Podcast 31 features a conversation recorded back in July in Dublin with Irish drag artist and gay rights campaigner Rory O’Neill (aka Panti Bliss). He told me about growing up gay in 1970s Ireland, escaping to Tokyo, the practical challenges of life with HIV and how his 2014 appearance on an Irish TV chat show caused a media storm with some historic consequences (this is admittedly hyperbole, but only a bit).
For more Rory related fun I recommend the documentary about his life, ‘The Queen Of Ireland’ and you can see Panti’s hugely inspiring speech at the Abbey Theatre below. I very much enjoyed meeting Rory and we had a great talk. I hope you enjoy listening.
Oh, and for Jaco Pastorius related links (as mentioned in the podcast outro), see bottom of this post.
Thanks to Seamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support.
Music and jingles by Adam Buxton (I am referring to myself in the third person to make Adam Buxton sound more important and not just a dick like me).
Best of wishes
Abxt
The answer to today’s puzzle
Earlier today I set you the following puzzle:
Three friends (A, B and C) are playing ping pong. They play the usual way: the winner stays on, and the loser waits his/her turn again. At the end of the day, they summarise the number of games that each of them played:
Continue reading...Go on, you can ace this one!
UPDATE: Today’s solution is now up - did you smash it?
Hello guzzlers
Today’s puzzle is a beauty. A smash hit.
Continue reading...Even the second time round, labyrinthitis remains impressively debilitating
My wife comes into the kitchen while I’m opening the post.
“What’s new?” she says.
Related: Tim Dowling: it’s the last lunch together before the middle one goes to university
Continue reading...Call for Expressions of Interest
Deadline: 5pm, Wednesday 9th November 2016
1. Introduction
Currently under construction at Little France in Edinburgh, a major new hospital building will be shared by two distinct acute services, the Department of Clinical Neuroscience (DCN) and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (RHSC).
We are seeking Expressions of Interest from creative practitioners based in the UK and Europe for three artist fellowships with the DCN. These will form part of an existing Art and Therapeutic Design (ATD) programme.
The programme framework has been developed in collaboration with both the NHS project team and charitable funders (the Edinburgh and Lothians Health Foundation) led by Ginkgo Projects Ltd.
I have tweeted about the current campaign by the FIA (the international motorists’ organisation) using Formula One racing drivers to tell children to wear hi-viz clothing when walking. It’s had a lot of re-tweeting and comments, not least directed at practitioners with a road safety remit . For some of us, this is just a matter of sighing that “you couldn’t make it up”. Others have argued that there is no evidence that campaigns like this will actually protect children. For many this is just a seasonal irritation – or even a partially useful intervention – to be accepted while we try to get on with the business of real road safety – reducing danger at source.
But we believe that this kind of intervention tells us a lot about what is going wrong – and what needs to change – if we are to have a civilised approach to road safety.
Formula One racer Jenson Button
The politics of what I have called “the conspicuity con” is dealt with in Chapter 9 of my “Death on the Streets: cars and the mythology of road safety” (1992) . (Downloadable here/)
Here I discuss how this kind of “road safety” initiative is not just without an evidence base, but actually becomes part of the problem it is supposed to deal with.
Mikael Colville-Andersen gives an interesting account of how “road safety” personnel push hi-viz in his son’s school. Mikael rightly reports the lack of evidence to show actual reductions in casualty rates as a result of this kind of programme. There is one rather ropey Norwegian study referred to, but even the UK Department of Transport has indicated that there is a lack of evidence to justify hi-viz for cyclists. Mikael states – correctly – that people genuinely concerned with safety on the road should deal with what he calls “the bull in the china shop“, namely danger from motorised traffic, which they don’t.
But it is worse than that. I would argue that a key reason why motorists feel they can get away with bad driving is the “Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You” (SMIDSY) excuse. (See the CyclingUK campaign against SMIDSY).And this excuse is facilitated by precisely the kind of campaigns which put the onus of responsibility to “Be Seen” on the least dangerous to others, rather than requiring those who are dangerous to others to watch out for their potential victims.
The most basic rule of safe driving, in the Highway Code and elsewhere, is to “Never drive in such a way that you cannot stop within visible distance“. But this is eroded, not just by failure to have proper speed limits and ensure compliance with them, but by the assumption that if motorists don’t “see” their victims, it is the victims’ fault. Whether by lengthening sight lines or other measures, the underlying belief system thrusts the onus of risk on to motorists’ actual or potential victims. It is not just a lack of speed control, or the failure to weed out motorists who can’t see where they are going. It is a general culture – promoted by the “road safety” industry – that you don’t have to fulfil a responsibility to properly watch out for those you may hurt or kill.
I emphasise “watching out for” because what is required is a thorough process where drivers consider the possible future positions of those they may drive into, think about their need to avoid doing so, and drive accordingly. The image of a pedestrian or cyclist on the retina of the driver is just the first part of this process. And the key element is searching – watching out or looking out – for these people in the first place. It is an active process which is far more effective than any amount of hi-viz, which may be irrelevant anyway. I am regularly told by motorists that they see plenty of cyclists without lights at night. Indeed: if they are driving properly (albeit in an urban area with street lighting) they will indeed see unlit cyclists.
Let me be quite clear about this. My argument is not just that this is rather unsavoury victim-blaming and morally objectionable. It is that it exacerbates the very problem it claims to address. In ten years or so these young people may become drivers, with the expectation that others should shoulder the responsibility that they as drivers have.
The official “road safety” response to this criticism is to avoid it. The typical answer is this: “Of course, motorists should watch where they are going, and we may have an advertising campaign to politely ask them to do so, but in the meantime wear hi-viz”. The problem with this is twofold: firstly, this “in the meantime” has been going on for over a century of motorists endangering, hurting and killing others, and that polite requests aren’t going to change anything. But the second point is the more important: the relentless shifting of responsibility away from those endangering others becomes part of the problem.
There is a sense in which Formula One drivers could be usefully put to work for a safer road environment. They are role models for young men who are already driving, and a message could be got across that fast driving should be left for the race track. Simple messages such as “Don’t break the speed limit on the road – it’s there for a reason” could be widely disseminated at race meetings. The basic rule about never driving in such a way that you can’t stop within visible distance could be pushed. If there is to be a focus on children’s safety, the Formula One stars could visit schools and talk to the parents driving children to school.
In fact, there are quite a few ways in which these drivers could be used to address the problems of inappropriate driving. I understand that very often they are prepared to engage in campaigns without demanding fees. But in a crucial sense that is not the point. We have to ask: What is actually going on here?
The task of the road danger reduction movement includes deconstructing the basic cultural assumptions which most of us unwittingly accept. I argue that using people who are role models is an important way in which basic – often negative and dangerous – ideas are subtly inculcated into young minds. It is worth repeating that the young people being targeted will gradually come to assume that it is the task of people outside cars to “be seen”, whether or not drivers are capable of, willing to and actually looking where they are going and watching out for other road users.
This is not a conspiracy theory – it’s actually a sociological analysis (the opposite of such ways of looking at social phenomena). Although we might argue for the Formula One drivers to be used, for example, to challenge the overly fast driving of young motorists, that is only one aspect of this issue. We also need to analyse the widely held beliefs (including our own) which constitute the background assumptions about safety, and challenge them when necessary. None of this means that pedestrians and cyclists should wear camouflage. But we do need to critically consider the often unspoken beliefs which our society has, and challenge them where necessary.
I recorded my conversation with Michaela Coel, (writer and star of BAFTA winning TV sitcom ‘Chewing Gum’) in the offices of Retort productions on September 9th 2016. If you’re in to exact timings, it was about 12.30pm when we started by talking about how Michaela wrote the first series of ‘Chewing Gum’. Quickly thereafter we talked in detail about bodily functions, finding and misplacing God, and sex clubs, amongst other things. Frequently coarse and explicit language was employed throughout so be warned -- this is not one for a family car journey.
The Malcom Gladwell podcast episode about satire that we spoke about briefly is here.
Thanks to Seamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support
I put the music and jingles together myself in case you’re wondering.
I’m grateful for your interest and I smile at you across the ether.
Abxt
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The answers to today’s teasers
Earlier today I set you the following puzzles, each penned by William Hartston, aka Bill off Gogglebox:
1) What is the next number in the following series?
23, 9, 20, 14, 14, 9, 20, 6, ...
Why might Henry I be an appropriate way to end the series?
2.1, 3.5, 3.3, 2.3, 1.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 1.8 ...
1, 2, 9, 12, 70, 89, 97, 102 ...
Continue reading...Apologies for the delay in updating you all about the Transcontinental. I should probably have let you know that I was the first woman in, by about two days. Which sort of means I won, unless you count the men and women together (which I prefer to), in which case I came in somewhere around 40th.
I wasn’t really sure how to report this though. Partly because it seems unnecessarily smug to devote a whole blog post to my winning a race (and I don’t have time to write the long rambling race report that would reveal winning to be merely the cherry on a very large and delicious cake), and partly because – well, a lazy cycle-tourer like me shouldn’t be winning the Transcontinental anyway. I’m under no illusions that if riders like Juliana, or Sarah Hammond, or Lael Wilcox entered they’d wipe the floor with me – and probably most of the men as well.
I’ve been puzzling for a while over why more women don’t enter these very long races – and the Transcon tends to have an even smaller female field than events like the TransAm (which had three women finish in the top ten this year), and the Tour Divide. I still don’t quite understand why, because to my mind the Transcontinental is the very best of all the races – it passes through more different landscapes and cultures than any other, and what’s more the checkpoints change every year, making it effectively a brand new race. There will never be an ultimate course record to beat (and records very quickly get boring, being as they are just an incrementally receding set of digits). And no matter how often you enter, the race will be a new challenge every year, with different mountains, different gravel, different headwinds and frustrations and detours, different demands on your body and mind and resources, and different adventures waiting to happen.
The Transcontinental is a voyage into the unknown every year – which is precisely why I love it. But I’ve begun to wonder whether this might be precisely what’s putting off other women from entering. Maybe it’s that tired old ‘safety’ chestnut again – the fact that women are asked so often whether it isn’t dangerous for them to travel without male protection that they begin to believe it, and become too cautious and timid to travel anywhere that seems overtly ‘different’ from what they’re already used to. Maybe this is why more women enter the TransAm Bike Race – because the course is always the same, so you can build up a good advance knowledge of the route by reading other people’s blog posts and ride reports, because America has a single, widely-spoken language, and because a thousand road trip movies have rendered the landscape of gas stations, motels and roadside diners familiar, and therefore apparently safe.*
But there are loads more factors on top of this. If I cast my mind back to 2014, when I falteringly emerged from my emphatic denial that I would ever ever be interested in something like the Transcontinental Race, I was more afraid that I simply wouldn’t be equal to it physically; that I’d fall on my face when I lined up against the few goddess-like women who dared to attempt it. Then I met Juliana Buhring. We’d followed each other online for a long time, and finally were in the same city for an evening, so we met up to drink beer and dispel our respective mythologies. She brought along Tori, who’d ridden the Tour Divide, and Peta, who’s ridden almost every long-distance race worth riding, and to my surprise these titans of cycling didn’t treat me like the clueless schoolgirl I felt I was. They talked about me entering the Transcon as if it was a thing I could do, and I was a person who could do it. By the end of the evening I’d admitted I wanted to enter, and by the end of the month, I had. (And here I am now.)
And ever since then I’ve been on a mission to convince other women to join me. To ride long distances, to enter more sportives and audaxes, to sign up for events like Paris-Brest-Paris and London-Edinburgh-London, and races like Tour Divide and TransAm – but really, to join me on the Transcontinental, because it’s a wonderful race, because I want more company and competition, and because there’s really no reason why dozens more women couldn’t do it.
So I’m going to recreate that fateful evening when Juliana, Tori and Peta convinced me to enter the Transcontinental. Well, sort of. What I imagined was that I’d get together a few women who’d done this sort of thing, invite along a few more who wanted to, or thought they might want to, have a few drinks and a chat, and gently convince them that they were no different from us. But then we announced the event (in London), and within a couple of days so many women had said they were coming that we realised there was no more space in the venue, and that we’d effectively sold out. Which is both good and bad – good in that there are clearly a lot more women interested in long distance than I thought; bad in that not all of them will be able to join us.
So we (The Adventure Syndicate) are planning a few more such evenings, up and down the country. If you can’t make it to London this Wednesday, maybe you can make it to Manchester on the 8th of November, or to Glasgow on the 10th November (both dates not 100% confirmed yet). We may even do a Bristol version as well, if there’s enough interest. Keep an eye on our Events page, sign up to our newsletter, and please do get in touch if you’re interested in coming along, no matter how much or little long-distance experience you have. You’re capable of far more than you think you are.
Excellent post-race portraiture by James Robertson.
_______________________________________________________________________________
* But look at the statistics – look at the hundreds of women who have been murdered along North American highways, and read Vanessa Veselka’s intelligent and thought-provoking essay on the lack of female road narratives, which points out that, by 2004 “so many women had been found dead along the interstates that the FBI started the Highway Serial Killers Initiative to keep track of them.” But then, it’s probably irresponsible of me to mention this: to paint one continent as violent and dangerous just to make a point and salvage the reputation of another, especially when I’ve travelled so happily and uneventfully there myself. This is where we would benefit from pulling apart the statistics a little bit. The women who are murdered while travelling along US highways generally aren’t well-to-do foreign cycle tourers with blogs and instagram feeds and hundreds of family and friends anxiously awaiting their return. They’re more likely to be women who don’t have a home to go back to, who are on the run from something, whose disappearance will cause far fewer ripples, and indeed, might not even be noticed until someone stumbles across the body in the bushes. An analogy would be the thousands of refugee women travelling through Europe at the moment, about whose safety no one seems particularly concerned, and who are far more at risk than a Transcontinental racer, though you could lump us all together as ‘women travelling alone’ if you saw fit.
Bill from the telly will boggle your noddle
UPDATE: Solutions now posted here
Hello guzzlers,
In the the week that Gogglebox is back on the telly, we’re all going to try our hands at some brilliant puzzles.
23, 9, 20, 14, 14, 9, 20, 6, ...
Why might Henry I be an appropriate way to end the series?
2.1, 3.5, 3.3, 2.3, 1.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 1.8 ...
1, 2, 9, 12, 70, 89, 97, 102 ...
Continue reading...Word up!
Hello guzzlers,
I’ve now been writing this puzzle blog for more than a year, and it’s been great fun. Today I have news! I have compiled a book of my favourite puzzles. Can You Solve My Problems? A Casebook of Ingenious, Perplexing and Totally Satisfying Puzzles will be out in November. It contains 125 puzzles along with historical and mathematical background. I’ve unearthed some hidden gems for you, I promise, and almost none of them has been featured on this blog before.
1) Volumes I, II and III of a dictionary are stacked vertically side by side on a shelf, in that order and with spines visible in the normal way. The thickness of the pages in each volume is 6cm, and the thickness of the cover of each volume is 5mm.
What is the horizontal distance from the first page of Volume I to the final page of Volume III?
2) Count upwards from ZERO thinking about the letters used in the names of numbers. The letter F appears for the first time in FOUR. The letter A first appears in ONE HUNDRED AND ONE.
Keep on counting, noting the first appearance of each letter in the names of numbers. What is the final letter that you will note down? In other words, when counting upwards, what is the final letter to appear in the name of a number?
3) The following statement is correct
< F is the first and the seventh letter of this sentence.>
4) Reorganise the letters of READING SLOW to form a single word.
Continue reading...I press play. Over the next quarter of an hour, an unbearable silence blossoms. ‘When does it get funny?’ my wife asks
I wake on Saturday morning brimming with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
“Morning,” I say when my wife’s eyes open. “What are we doing today?”
Continue reading...I met Michael Palin at his club in Soho, London on the morning of 31st May 2016. We spoke about travel writing with reference to my Dad who also wrote about travel for a living (some of his pieces are still here on his blog) and who loved many of the same travel books as Michael, especially Venice by Jan Morris and A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor .
We also spoke about the Monty Python films, particularly The Life Of Brian, The Meaning Of Life and the ending of The Holy Grail. I had taken along my tatty copies of the Meaning Of Life book and The Life Of Brian Scrapbook which provided jumping off points for some of our conversation.
We also spoke briefly about the difficult process of making ‘American Friends’ -- a film released in 1991 that Michael wrote and also starred in. Check out the trailer which begins with the powerful endorsement: “In the tradition of Howard’s End and Enchanted April comes a film that receives three and a half stars from John Anderson…” That must really have packed them in.
Michael’s account of Graham Chapman’s death, which I mentioned at the end of our conversation, can be found in his excellent Travelling To Work diaries. It’s my favourite of the 3 volumes, but they’re all highly entertaining. Listening to them all was a reminder of how important he and Python were to me as a youngster.
Perhaps for that reason I was very nervous meeting Michael. I imagined he would be rude, physically aggressive and self involved but weirdly, he was charming.
Thanks to Seamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing.
love A Bxt
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